Text/A Zhi
Preface
Whether a civilization has a sense of repentance or not, and the form of its repentance consciousness is of great significance to our accurate understanding of the civilization.
Repentance is a means of maintaining mental health, both personally and nationwidely.
Only when a nation has a sense of repentance can it correctly review history and wisely choose the future, and the ancient Egyptian civilization was so brilliant that it did not escape its fate in the end, and its lack of historical reflection and the distortion of its sense of repentance cannot but be said to be one of the fatal reasons for this fate.
Confession and the repentant consciousness of the ancient Egyptians
Confession has its roots in religion.
Buddhists repent to the elders, Christians either to the priests or to God in their hearts, Muslims to Allah, and Jews to God.
However, not all confessions are religious.
Margaret · In his essay "The Psychological and Spiritual Efficacy of Confession", Kryuk divides confession into four types: ecclesiastical confession, emotional confession, legal confession, and psychological confession.
These literary works on the subject of confession provide us with the richest material for exploring the human consciousness of repentance.
However, Augustine's Confessions were not written in a confessional language, which had been written for more than a thousand years.
For the ancient Egyptians, the suffering caused by illness and the need for the dead to live forever in another world were all problems that the ancient Egyptians needed to solve.
The solution of the former should begin with the elimination of suffering, so what is the source of suffering?
The ancient Egyptians explained two things: one was the devil's doing, and the other was their own misdeeds.
The devil naturally wants to get rid of the demon, and if the misdeeds are done, it is necessary to find out who will punish them, and the real disputes have their own management at all levels to uphold justice, there are laws, there are circuit courts and central courts.
The merits of the sentence are all under the orders of the officials, and there is no need to repent.
Only when God is offended, the offended God will send punishment, and illness is one of God's means of punishing the offender.
There is no other way to save the blasphemous offense than to admit the mistake to the gods, and the ancient Egyptians inscribed their confessions to the gods on stone tablets.
This mechanism of redemption is not complicated, and Assman explains it with an "isolating effect".
The theoretical basis is based on the judgment that man is a social animal.
Human beings are social animals, and they cannot exist in isolation from society, and once they are separated, they will panic.
For the ancient Egyptians, the bonds that bound society together were what God recognized as the normal order, and to leave God would be to be far away from the normal social order and to be driven away from society.
The ancient Egyptians were far away from the gods because of their sins, and at the same time from society. There is only one way to return, that is, to appease the offended god through repentance, and only in this way can one return to normal society.
The dead desire to enter the eternal world and receive eternal life with God, however, not everyone is able to enter the eternal world.
The key is whether each deceased can successfully pass the layers of God's scrutiny, and each level of review is crucial.
Similar to the Last Judgment in Christian thought, the Book of the Dead in ancient Egypt has a vivid painting of the deceased being weighed in the face of the god Osiris and judged by the heart.
Anubis, the jackal-headed god, led the deceased to a huge scale and placed the heart of the deceased on one end of the scale, and on the other side of the scale was the feathered Ma'at, who represented fairness, justice, and order.
Ma'at is both a symbol of justice, order, and fairness, and a deity incarnated in justice, and Thoth, the god of wisdom, is responsible for recording.
This may have been the prototype of the Christian "Last Judgment", however, in the consciousness of the ancient Egyptians, access to the eternal world was not so simple.
Whether it is the earliest "pyramid text", the later "coffin text", or the later "Book of the Dead", or even the "Eminem Duatwen Wen", the central content is a guide book that guides the deceased to successfully enter the eternal world through one level after another.
One of the most important elements of these guidelines is the "negative answer" to God.
So, did the ancient Egyptians really have a sense of repentance?
Repentance is a confession and remorse for one's own mistakes or sins, not a forced confession, nor a forced confession.
Repentance is the act of taking the initiative to speak out about a fault or crime that no one knows about, at the risk of being hated and punished, with remorse in one's heart. But the confession of the ancient Egyptians had no element of remorse.
Whether it is a confession involving the treatment of illness or a confession to the eternal world, remorse is hardly found in ancient Egyptian confessional texts, and some are mostly justifications.
Although the ancient Egyptians believed that they would confess their faults to the gods when they were suffering because of their offense to the gods, such as illness, they were more likely to appease the offending gods and thus release themselves from their punishment.
This is still not an active mental remorse, but a forced means, and the ancient Egyptians' sense of repentance is still distorted compared to other ancient civilizations.
Confession in the text
Repentance is closely related to sin and guilt.
"Sin" and "guilt" are two concepts, the former being born in the soul and the latter being found in the law.
Therefore, the narrative of the ancient Egyptian confessional text should begin with the ancient Egyptian vocabulary for expressing sin.
Confession of sin, or more precisely confession of wrong, was also uncommon for the ancient Egyptians. The ancient Egyptians did not seem small to God.
Throughout the 3,000-year dynastic history of ancient Egypt, it is rare to see a confessor humbly appear before God.
Even at the Last Judgment in the funeral rites, the confession made in the presence of Osiris was only a "negative answer".
It is for this reason that Egyptologists have given a "negative answer" another name, called a "declaration of innocence".
However, during the Nineteenth Dynasty of the New Kingdom (c. 1350-1200 BCE), a collection of praise, prayer tablets and papyrus texts were excavated at the site of the artisan village of Derel Medineh, where the craftsmen who worked for the Theban necropolis.
Most of these documents are now preserved in museums in Turin, Italy, London, England, and Berlin, Germany.
The texts in these texts became the most typical representations of ancient Egyptian confessional texts, all of which were confessions to God.
The steles were erected in small temples, and the builders of the temples and the erectors of the steles were craftsmen who built the necropolis, mainly draftsmen and scribes.
These people were of humble status, so the temples and worship they built were called "the religion of the poor" by later scholars.
The most representative of this type of confessional literature is the inscription of three people, namely Nebre, Neferabu and Nekhtamun.
Nebra was a cartographer of the nineteenth dynasty of the New Kingdom in the Theban Necropolis.
Ancient Egyptian tombs were covered with inscriptions and drawings that required not only artistic training, but also a vivid drawing of each letter of the inscription, which required a lot of work for draftsmen.
Nefer Abu also belonged to the Nineteenth Dynasty and was identified as a "servant of the land of Ma'at", whose exact identity is unknown, and may have been a craftsman who lived in the artisan village of Medina.
Nekht Amun has the same name as one of Nebra's sons who appears in the inscription, but may not have been Nebra's son, as Neht Amun was a common name at the time, and there were many duplicate names.
The three of them left behind many stone monuments, which are scattered in museums in Germany, Britain, France, and Italy.
Three of these vows were included in the second volume of the Ancient Egyptian Literature by the Israeli Egyptologist Miria mLichtheim as literary inscriptions of ancient Egyptian confessions.
The first is a votive stele dedicated to the god Amunla, now in the Berlin Museum under number 20377.
The stele is a domed limestone stele measuring 0.67x0.30 m. At the top of the stele is the god Amun sitting on the throne facing a high tower gate, kneeling with his hands raised high at his feet, in a prayer posture.
Beneath the picture are 16 columns of text, and in the lower right corner of the text are four kneeling men, also in prayer postures.
There isn't much to say about confession, but the whole thing is to ask God for forgiveness.
The second is a votive tablet dedicated to the god Mertesehgal by Nefer Abu, which is now in the Museum of Turin, Italy, numbered 102, and is a rectangular stone tablet of 0.20×0.54 meters.
The goddess Mertesehgal is the serpent god and is the patron deity of the Thebes Necropolis.
Because it is believed to live in the mountains of the western desert, the ancient Egyptians also called it the "Western Peak". On this stele, the goddess Mertesehgal appears on the right side in the form of a three-headed figure.
In front of her is a stone table with her salutation above her head and 17 columns of hymns on the left.
The third is a votive tablet dedicated to the god Ptah by Nefer Abu, now in the British Museum under number 589. The stele is a domed limestone stele, 0.39x0.28 m.
At the top of the stele is a relief motif of the god Ptah sitting in a shrine with an offering table in front of him.
We cannot say that these three hymns are the entirety of the ancient Egyptian confessional texts, because the confessional texts still appear sporadically in the ancient Egyptian texts.
However, these three poems are recognized as the most representative texts of ancient Egyptian confessional literature, and the whole picture can be seen at a glance, and the confessional consciousness of ancient Egyptians can be inferred from this.
Why the ancient Egyptians did not repent
The ancient Egyptians did not have a sense of repentance in the modern sense. Repentance should be the confession of the penitent's mistake or sin, and it is a remorse from the heart. The inner conscious behavior of the subject is not found in ancient Egyptian texts.
The confessions of the ancient Egyptians are sketchy and not specific, and it is difficult to know why the confessions were made from the confessions of the ancient Egyptians, and even the reader cannot even know what the confessors did wrong.
The "negative answer" in the Book of the Dead, although most of them are called "negative confessions". We see only "denial" and not "repentance".
Unlike the "negative answers" that need to be recited in funeral rites, there is no clear statement of what was done wrong.
The most specific thing that can be read from the above "hymns" is that God was punished for saying the wrong name of God.
In a civilization that cannot be separated from God, people recite God's name many times every day, and the more times they meditate, the greater the probability of making mistakes.
However, judging from the scarcity of confessional texts in ancient Egyptian texts, it seems that personal errors in meditation were not the motivation for confession.
It is not common to mispronounce the name of the god in public, because many ancient Egyptian inscriptions were made for ritual use, in order to avoid forgetting and avoiding the wrong name of the god.
Still, mistakes are inevitable, and even in what should be a specific description of events, we see only the arguments of the innocent.
The ancient Egyptian sages probably didn't do anything wrong in their lives, didn't mispronounce the name of the god once.
But there must not be many such saints. Therefore, whenever I read a certain "book of the dead", I always suspect that the undead is lying.
Historians often make the inference that when they say "don't" in the code, it is often when wrong deeds or crimes prevail.
The "negation" in the ancient Egyptian "Book of the Dead" reveals the prevalence of these crimes at the time.
Repentance of God is clear at a glance, not out of remorse, but out of fear. Therefore, we have not yet found a text of confession.
Stylistically, except for the "negative answer" in the "Book of the Dead", the confessional documents are all votive tablets dedicated to God and hymns.
Confession is like passing the test, and denial, vagueness, and general concealment are the characteristics of ancient Egyptian confessional writing.
As to why there is a lack of true confessional consciousness in ancient Egyptian literature, we cannot bypass the cultural attributes of ancient Egypt to find the answer.
epilogue
The culture of shame and the culture of guilt are only one dimension of cultural identity, and we cannot use this single dimension to summarize all the attributes of a culture.
The influence of ancient Egyptian culture on later generations is far beyond our imagination, but ancient Egyptian culture does belong to the culture of shame in this dimension.